Obituary

Verity Lambert

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday November 28 2007

Verity Lambert was the producer of Doctor Who from the start of the series, rather than the second batch of episodes, as we said in the obituary below. Terry Nation played no part in creating the series, but began writing for it later. An editing error made Minder, Danger UXB and The Naked Civil Servant into BBC, rather than ITV, productions. None were serials: the first two were series, and the last a single drama.

Verity Lambert, who has died aged 71 of cancer, will always be remembered as the presiding genius behind Doctor Who, the science-fiction romp which has intermittently flourished on television for nearly 45 years. But in a career lasting much the same span she was responsible, in one capacity or another, for a whole host of productions that combined excellence and popularity.

She was not the only woman, as has sometimes been implied, to zoom to the top in those comparatively early years of TV. Others included Grace Wyndham Goldie, Joan Kemp-Welch, Aida Young, Stella Richman and Irene Shubik. But unlike them, perhaps, Lambert had no grounding in drama school or the films. The daughter of a successful accountant, she was educated at Roedean, followed by a year at the Sorbonne. She started work as a typist in a London hotel, then for the newly established Granada TV, in 1956, in its press office - another secretarial job, but one that was to endow her with a lasting love of television.

She contrived to get an opening in ABC Television, where Sydney Newman was in charge of production. Lambert's enthusiasm caught his eye. She worked on the regular Sunday night Armchair Theatre, and when Newman was headhunted by the BBC in 1963 she was one of several colleagues he took with him. Doctor Who, dreamed up by Newman himself with the writer Terry Nation, and starring William Hartnell, was an immediate project. Lambert was involved from the outset, and for the second batch of episodes was producer, credited with introducing the most celebrated of the doctor's adversaries, the Daleks.

Adam Adamant Lives! (1965-66), which she created with Tony Williamson, was also science fiction with a time-warp element, if less of a comic strip. Gerald Harper played an Edwardian gentleman hero thawed out, after half a century in a block of ice, to take on the villains of swinging London, a nice contrast. One of the directors was Ridley Scott, later to achieve fame with Blade Runner.

Lambert moved steadily on as a respected and versatile producer, at home in any reasonably popular genre. In 1965 she was the first producer of The Newcomers, a twice-weekly BBC soap opera about a London family adapting to life on a rural overspill estate. In 1968 she oversaw the resumption of Detective, a 1964 crime-anthology series drawing on literary sleuths from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes to HRF Keating's Inspector Ghote. In 1969 she raided another favourite source, the short stories of Somerset Maugham. In 1970 she left the BBC to go to London Weekend TV, which had replaced ATV. Budgie (1971-72) enterprisingly cast Adam Faith as a lovable chancer in scripts by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall. Briefly back at the BBC, she produced and co-created the suffragette serial Shoulder to Shoulder (1974). It was her next and penultimate move as an employee, to Thames Television and its subsidiary Euston Films in 1974, that resulted in her most impressive record of all.

There was: Howard Schuman's Rock Follies (1976), with Charlotte Cornwell, Julie Covington and Rula Lenska; John Mortimer's immortal Rumpole of the Bailey (1978-92) as brought to life by Leo McKern; Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978), ending with Edward Fox's uncanny reading of the abdication broadcast; the conclusion of the Quatermass saga 25 years after Nigel Kneale's original; wonderful BBC serials such as Minder, Danger UXB, and above all, Philip Mackie's The Naked Civil Servant (1975), starring John Hurt as Quentin Crisp. Every one, whether a series or a singleton, owed something - if not its very existence - to Lambert.

For three years from 1982 she was director of productions for Thorn-EMI Screen Entertainment, responsible for film series, cinema films and all permutations between. One of the movies was Dennis Potter's undervalued Dreamchild.

In 1985 she formed her own company, neatly called Cinema Verity. Her productions included A Cry in the Dark, from the Australian story of a baby supposedly borne off by a dingo, Alan Bleasdale's political blockbuster GBH for Channel 4, a comedy series, Coasting, for Granada, and the Jonathan Creek whodunits (or how they dunnit) for the BBC. Also, in the early 1990s, for the BBC was a rare flop from Lambert: Eldorado, the soap opera set among British expats in Spain.

She continued to work until the last. Only six or seven weeks ago she was planning a further episode of a latter-day series, Love Soup. She gave the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh film festival in 1990. She was a governor of the British Film Institute (1981-86) and a fellow from 1998. She was also active at the National Film and Television School, and the recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Strathclyde. She was made OBE in 2002, and at the forthcoming Women in Film and Television awards was due to receive a lifetime award. She was divorced from Colin Bucksey, a television director.

Kenith Trodd writes: Among the little bunch of television drama producers whose credits criss-cross and virtually define the too easily labelled golden age (say mid-60s to a bit short of mid-90s), it is not Verity Lambert's gender or her daring that first strikes you about her output but its sheer quantity. Did she manage to stop for a cup of tea at all especially in those early frantic years? In fact no one remembers Verity haggard and obsessive behind a desk; rather, elegant, sybaritic and inviting, maybe near a bar.

That was her particular gift of course, to charm creatively, and productively, but even the more puritanically driven of us knew (though we rarely learned to be grateful) that in those years we were the beneficiaries of a historical lucky break that made it (well, not quite) harder to fail than succeed.

In drama, not the controller nor even the writer, let alone the accountant, was king, but the producer, now a creature extinct in all but name. He (Verity, was a very rare she) was poised professionally on that rich cusp between the management and the talent - writers, directors and the hundreds of skilled creatives - outside. If the bosses trusted the producer, and often they did with a combative generosity, it was the producer who made a crucial difference to the health and vitality of the entire system. Verity was at the very top of this steep, wary tree. She had the greatest range, charisma and durability. Not only the producer's producer, but the audience's finest ally.

· Verity Ann Lambert, television producer, born November 27 1935; died November 22 2007

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